All those who screamed “eugenics” at Flight were rather missing the point: eugenics involves the forcible or coerced sterilisation of individuals considered “unfit” to breed, for whatever reason; Flight was just saying it might not be in our interests to subsidise people's children. There is a vast difference between banning something and refusing to pay for it; only an authoritarian socialist who believes everything should either be subsidised or illegal could possibly confuse the two. Besides which, the argument is not genetics but children being born into worklessness.

Flight was forced to retract his statement, although I wonder if under his breath he muttered E pur si muove! For as John Rentoul pointed out in the Independent on Sunday (link doesn't seem to work), the Tory peer was almost certainly correct from a factual point of view: his only crime was to voice a heresy. He writes:

Yet the mere shadow of word-association diverts debate about tax and benefit policy into a gotcha ritual of heresy-hunting. He said that policy designed to alleviate child poverty has a perverse effect in encouraging people on benefits to have more children than they otherwise would.

This has been demonstrated by several academic surveys, not least a recent one by the unimpeachable Institute for Fiscal Studies. In December 2008 it published a paper entitled "Does welfare reform affect fertility?" It was barely reported in the press, for reasons in which social psychologists might be interested, because it found that, since Labour increased child-related benefits in 1999, "there was an increase in births (by around 15 per cent) among the group affected by the reforms". It is not eugenicist to point out that this can have undesirable consequences. Or, as Flight put it, rather mildly, "that's not very sensible".

Of course sociology is not a hard science, and there may be studies that contradict those findings (and correlation does not mean causation), but there certainly is a credible theory, as there are for many counter-intuitive conservative arguments. It brings me back to my question last week – why is being a “skeptic” Left-wing, when modern conservatism (ie classical liberalism) is essentially political scepticism?

Rentoul goes on to say that “this is not the only example of the British media-politics nexus getting something very wrong for years, for high-minded motive”, and lists the euro and immigration among other things.

Anyone who wants to reintroduce capital punishment is an extremist. Anyone who wants to leave the EU is a xenophobe. Anyone who analyses levels of street crime amongst young black men is a racist. Anyone who questions the fact that every year sees a record increase in success in exams is engaged in running down real achievement by young people. And anyone who wonders whether some of the 7 per cent of the population of working age who are on Disability Benefit might be capable of working at something or other is a callous monster.

Now one may not agree with these themes, and McKie says he doesn’t, but it is certainly true that proper debate is often hindered by feigned outrage, made only worse by the invention of Twitter. In Spoilt Rotten Theodore Dalrymple argued that sentimentality has squeezed out rational debate on so many subjects that it has become impossible to argue against clearly deluded ideas; never mind that child-centred education has failed children, community sentencing increases crime and economic aid has never lifted a country out of poverty, to argue against them is to provoke rage and accusations.

What matters is that someone feels good about their opinion, and looking to support children, underprivileged young offenders and the starving millions does the trick as well as a pound flicked at a homeless man outside an off license.

And that goes quadruple for immigration. In fact one of the reasons I bang on about that subject is that there is an intellectual void waiting to be filled by someone who's not mad or racist. After all these months I’m waiting for someone, anyone, to give me a convincing, rational social argument for mass immigration beyond the improvements in cuisine, something that offsets the reduction in community cohesion, civic trust and liberalism, and the increase in inequality, mental illness and crime that are all likely by-products of high levels of immigration. So… anyone?